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I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"�worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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This week the impeccable D.T. Max yields to us the life and thoughts of author David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker story "The Unfinished." My friend Ivy Goodman made certain that I saw and read the piece; as soon as her note came in, I stopped all else and did.

The story of Wallace, who took his own life at the age of 46 last year, is the desperately sad story of a man so committed to his craft that his own impassioned brilliance was, in the end, defeating. He could think through and past himself, but that wasn't enough. Indeed, as Max reveals, nothing but an utter reinvention of storytelling would suffice for Wallace, and since he'd done that at least once with his massive novel "Infinite Jest," attempts to write his third novel required an act of even greater transcendence.

"I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff," Max quotes him as saying. And: "It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies...in be(ing) willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet."

Make living people feel stuff. Yes. Isn't that it? Isn't that, in the end, what books are supposed to do? And why is that so hard (because, oh, goodness, that is hard)? And has it become increasingly irrelevant in a world that honors and rewards It books and Twitter books, quick tricks, sleights of hand, ideas that can be captured in a sentence?

We write our books, and then we rewrite them. We make them new every day to ourselves, and the moment they become flat in our eyes, overly familiar, known, processed—well, that's the moment they have died. That's the moment when we must put them away until something stirs in us again. Because if we cannot make ourselves feel stuff, we sure as heck aren't going to move others. The story of David Foster Wallace is a tremendously tragic one. It has the wrong ending. But his life, as told by D.T. Max this week, serves as a reminder about this writerly enterprise of ours. It puts us back in our seats with a whole and right directive:

Make living people feel stuff.

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